Prepping for PARCC

When standardized testing time rolls around next spring, Illinois students won't be sharpening their No. 2 pencils in preparation to fill in those tiny ovals on a Scantron sheet.

Starting with 2014-15 school year, an online assessment, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers — a rigorous exam designed to align with Common Core standards and test students' college and employment readiness — will be given to students in grades three through 11.

The PARCC will replace the Illinois State Achievement Test, which is given in grades three through eight, and the Prairie State Achievement Exam, given to 11th-graders.

In preparation for the PARCC, local school districts are participating in online pilot and field exams. Macomb School District fourth-graders at Edison School this week participated in a pilot ISAT test with Common Core-aligned questions. Edison School is one of 15 schools in the state participating and among the first three, along with schools in Charleston and Carbondale, to take the pilot test, which will help schools and the state work out any kinks before next year.

Katie Hoge, technology coordinator for Macomb Schools, said the Illinois State Board of Education had concerns about the amount of information that could be gleaned from a PARCC pilot test. In response, the state chose an online ISAT test in order to glean information about how school districts work with the technology of the online testing system.

Hodge said she's confident that the school district has the technology infrastructure it needs to handle online standardized testing, in which large numbers of students will be logged onto multiple computers at once.

"At this point, we're feeling really good about the amount of technology we have in the district, especially because the testing window will be four weeks opposed to the two weeks," she said. "We'd like to see more technology devices possibly for the lower elementary. But at this point district-wide we have enough devices we could do it in the four-week period."

Hoge said one concern was having enough bandwidth to handle large amounts of data at once.

"We were concerned about the bandwidth and downloading the content to the desktop computers," she said, "but because of proctor caching the test loaded very quickly without any lag time or errors."

Proctor caching, Hoge said, is where a large amount of content is downloaded from another source — in this case, Pearson, the education company and ISAT test creator — to one computer and then served out to other computers.

Edison fourth-graders used desktop computers for testing. The school has 90 desktop computers in three labs and each lab was utilized during the pilot test. Additionally, laptop carts are available in each of the district's schools.

Edison Principal Maureen Hazell said one of the perks of online standardized testing is that the results will arrive sooner. Once a student completes a test online, it's electronically submitted.

"They say that it should and that will be helpful," Hazell said about early test results. "They usually come in the summer after the teachers are already gone and then we do a quick look at the data in the fall, but it would be nice to have it before the end of the school year."

Bushnell-Prairie City and West Prairie students this year are participating in a larger-scale field test of the PARCC exam with both online and paper tests.

Testing will be done at the end of March and, for select grades, at the end of the school year.

B-PC and West Prairie have implemented iPad tablet computer programs and those devices will be used for testing in the higher grades. West Prairie middle and high school students have the devices, as do high schoolers at B-PC.

According Craig Burns, B-PC's technology coordinator, the district might look at its technology infrastructure once the PARCC test is fully implemented next year.

"In the limited capacity that we're testing, yes we do," he said of the computers available in the district. "But once this becomes fully implemented, we may look at our computer inventory and look at creative scheduling."

Before implementing its one-to-one technology program this year at the high school — junior high students will get iPads next year — the district upgraded its electricity wiring and bandwidth. There is a desktop computer lab in B-PC's high school, junior high and elementary school.

"At present now, we have a 30 station computer lab," said Burns of the elementary school. "To test everybody, we're going to have to get creative with scheduling."

Computerized standardized testing was a consideration when the school district made the decision to implement a one-to-one iPad program.

"I think that's the direction all these tests are heading," Burns said.

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